Marriage amendment: Broad coalition with simple message key to defeat

Maria De La Cruz of Outfront Minnesota cries after it was announced that Minnesota's marriage amendment was defeated Tuesday night. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)

Last fall, shortly after Richard Carlbom joined the campaign to defeat the state's marriage amendment, it had an event for clergy at a church in Minneapolis. Organizers expected 150 to 200. More than 500 showed up.

A few months later, the campaign asked supporters to host 100 house parties. By the end of that day, the number of individual donors had quadrupled.

Fast forward to this year's State Fair, where the campaign "ordered a ton of extra T-shirts" and Carlbom was seriously second-guessing whether it was worth it.

"Within 36 hours, we were out of the T-shirts," he said.

Early in the 17-month campaign that wound up defeating an attempt to define marriage in Minnesota's constitution as only between a man and a woman, organizers began to see signs that "the number of Minnesotans who are truly interested in participating in this campaign was much larger than probably any other campaign we had (seen) in the past," Carlbom said.

That base of energized volunteers fueled what several observers called the largest grass-roots campaign in Minnesota history, culminating in a vote to turn back a gay-marriage ban that had succeeded in 30 other states -- on a night when voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington made history by legalizing gay marriage.

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The "Vote No" campaign benefited from a roughly 2-to-1 fundraising advantage that paid for more robust advertising and voter-contact efforts that reached into hundreds of thousands of homes.

"When the history is written about this constitutional amendment," said longtime Republican campaign operative Maureen Shaver, "the length of the campaign and the intensity by the Vote No supporters is unprecedented in modern campaigns."

THE BEGINNINGS

Minnesotans United for All Families was born just hours after the Minnesota House voted in May 2011 to put the marriage amendment on the ballot. It was a joint creation of Project 515 and OutFront Minnesota. The national LGBT civil-rights group Human Rights Campaign soon issued a statement saying it would help.

The circle then widened to include more organizations, which at first simply went to their members with a request that they pledge to vote no.

"And then volunteer at the State Fair. And then volunteer at one of our community celebrations -- over time, allowing those folks to engage at a deeper and deeper level, so that eventually in the last week of the campaign we had 27,000 volunteers; we made more than 900,000 phone calls; we knocked on more than 400,000 doors; and we did something the size and scale to which this state has never seen," Carlbom said.

The Legacy Amendment that passed in 2008 had about 300 groups backing it, but Minnesotans United topped 700, said Sheila Smith, who was involved in running both campaigns.

All four major political parties were represented in the coalition, Carlbom said, along with more than 500 faith leaders plus key business leaders.

Despite support for the amendment from their church leaders, thousands of Catholics also joined the "Vote No" cause.

"Instead of parish meetings, we had house meetings, so that Catholics could gather and talk about how to reach out to fellow parishioners and encourage them to vote no," Carlbom said.

BUSINESS STEPS UP

One thing that struck University of Minnesota professor Lawrence Jacobs was the willingness of large businesses, particularly retailers, to come out against the amendment.

"Not that long ago, a retail business would not go near this because of their fear of losing customers," he said.

Businesses appear to be at a "tipping point" where participation in global markets and pressure to keep good workers are tilting them into opposing this kind of measure, said Jacobs, director of the U's Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.

Cultivating the corporate sector required walking a fine line.

From the start, Minnesota's business community was seen as a possible ally against the amendment, given its embrace of gay and lesbian employees. Yet corporations also tend to steer clear of clashes over social issues, so campaign organizers moved cautiously and methodically.

"As early as last fall, we started with focused outreach -- part of it was just identifying business leaders who might be willing to play some kind of role," said Tom Horner, a Twin Cities public relations executive.

At breakfast meetings, organizers worked to develop a business case against the amendment, focused on preserving a welcoming climate and the ability to recruit top talent. Then, CEOs and corporate boards were approached by fellow executives, led by John Taft of RBC Wealth Management and Charlie Zelle of Jefferson Lines.

But there was a parallel effort under way. Gay and lesbian employee groups at major companies were also approached, to provide a nudge from the inside.

"It was both a grass-roots and a treetop campaign," Horner said.

Over the past six months, a succession of Minnesota business leaders stepped forward to urge the amendment's defeat. They included Marilyn Carlson Nelson of the Carlson Cos., Ken Powell of General Mills, Dr. Alan Goldbloom from Children's Hospitals and the Pohlad brothers, who own the Minnesota Twins among other properties. Other executives took less-visible roles, donating money or holding fundraisers.

The Minnesota campaign had more corporate buy-in than those in most states. During a similar fight in North Carolina this spring, not one major corporation publicly opposed the marriage amendment.

The key to holding such a diverse coalition together was to rely on research to select which messages resonated most with voters. Other campaigns had suffered from a lack of discipline in that regard, Carlbom said.

"In the final days of the Prop 8 campaign (banning gay marriage in California), because so many different people had different opinions about what messages would move people, there were four different TV ads on in the L.A. market."

In Minnesota, the message that was settled on, said Smith, was "this sort of Midwestern value of the Golden Rule, to treat others as you would like to be treated.

"In the past, the conversation has been about the rights that gay people are denied," such as hospital visitation, Smith said. "While that does resonate, it's about other people, not about ourselves."

It was also decided the primary delivery method for the message would be personal conversations.

"We wanted to spark authentic conversations, millions of them, from one Minnesotan to another," Carlbom said. He and other campaign leaders knew that was their best shot at reinforcing with people their message that gays and lesbians want to be able to marry for the same reason everyone else does.

"The messaging was focused," said Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the ACLU of Minnesota. "That's pretty amazing given the size and scope of the campaign."

Bonnie Sharpe, 63, of Shoreview struggled with how to vote on the marriage amendment. But after a lot of thought and reflection, she decided to vote no.

"It's a basic right, and who am I to judge?" Sharpe said. "It really is a civil rights issue. And putting it in the constitution makes it very difficult to change."

RUN-UP TO ELECTION

Shortly before the election, amendment opponents released an ad that former Republican Senate Minority Leader Duane Benson said would turn out to be "the lead dog in the parade."

It showed Republican state Rep. John Kriesel, a military veteran, paying tribute on the House floor to Andrew Wilfahrt, a gay soldier from Minnesota killed in Afghanistan.

"So you have a legislator, who happened to be a veteran, saying the same thing as a business person and a spiritual (leader) and a laborer and your neighbors, and I mean after a while you started to pose (the question), 'So who does want to vote yes?' " said Benson.

The Kriesel ad "was just huge," Benson said.

"I think it gave a lot of people the license to say: 'Yeah, why are we doing this? I don't think we ought to be doing this.' "

The week before the election, Minnesotans United made its huge door-knocking and phone-calling push.

As returns came in on Election Night, the "Vote Yes" side made it close at times but was not able to get above 50 percent support.

Carlbom was speaking on stage to supporters about 1:45 a.m. Wednesday when someone interrupted to tell him the Associated Press had declared that the amendment was defeated. He threw his hands straight up and screamed with joy.

"Tonight, Minnesota proved that love is bigger than government," he would say later. "Minnesota has become the first state in the nation to beat back a freedom-limiting amendment like this."

OUTSPENDING SUPPORTERS

"The fundamental problem is we got very seriously outspent," said Frank Schubert, the California-based consultant who ran the pro-traditional-marriage campaign in Minnesota and the other three states where marriage was on the ballot last week.

Carlbom's group, Minnesotans United, raised more than $11 million, compared with about $5 million for pro-amendment Minnesota for Marriage.

One example of what that money bought was the ability for amendment opponents to go beyond basic core messaging and target key constituencies, Schubert said.

"They ran ads aimed at Republicans. They ran ads aimed at people of faith. They ran ads aimed at the minority community. And they chipped away a couple of points here and there among these constituencies."

A couple of points off in each of these key groups, Schubert said, and "that combined accounts for the difference."

Marriage-amendment backers suffered from overconfidence, as well, said Brian Brown, president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for Marriage, which contributed about $1.5 million to the Minnesota amendment effort.

"I think there was a bit of complacency on our side, honestly," he said.

"The reality is we've always won these, and though we sort of shouted from the mountaintops that we needed more resources, I think ... some funders thought 'Well, they've been able to make it in tough states before.'â "

Fighting simultaneously in four states spread resources thin, Brown said, and in a way his group's past success had made future wins more difficult.

"We've already won all the red states. So the remaining states were always going to be the toughest for us, and it's absolutely no indication about what's coming next to say that they've been able to win on their own turf."

In Minnesota and the other three states combined, traditional marriage forces were outspent by $20 million, Schubert said.

In addition to the relative lack of funding, Minnesota's effort also suffered from an inability to turn support from evangelical Protestants into grass-roots activism, he said.

"We wanted to get them out walking precincts. We wanted to get them out registering voters. We wanted them to be making phone calls to do voter-identification work," he said. "And we could not ever really get critical mass in that evangelical community to do that."

On the fundraising front, there has to be a wider base, Schubert said.

"We need to bring some of these economic conservatives into the game so that they realize that when marriage does well, it will help the Republican ticket across the board."